Accessible Future

Eight years ago, Jesse Noonan was coaching two brothers at a Gold Coast skatepark when their sister Matilda rolled up in her wheelchair. He got a drill out of his car, put some holes in a skateboard and bolted it under her walking frame. By the end of that session she was going down ramps. That afternoon became Skate Advantage, Jesse's adaptive skateboarding program. He talks with Simon about...

Before Cody Wills heads to the grocery store or the pub, he's already running through questions most people never think about. Can he reach what he needs? Will the bartender even see him? Is that door handle four feet up? Cody was born with achondroplasia, a form of dwarfism. He talks with Simon about growing up as a little person in Manitoba, the planning that goes into going somewhere new, a...

In 2012, Bean Gill left an abusive marriage, watched her parents separate, and then woke up on a trip to Las Vegas with pain in her lower back. Ten minutes later she couldn't feel her legs, and was later diagnosed with transverse myelitis. She's now a keynote speaker and co-founder of Reyu Paralysis Recovery Center, an Alberta nonprofit using activity-based therapy to help people regain fu...

Claire Buchanan spent eleven seasons on defense for Canada's women's national para ice hockey team, and she now covers the sport as a broadcaster on The Neutral Zone. In this episode she breaks down how the game actually works — two sticks, blades that look like one — why women's para hockey still isn't a Paralympic event, and what it costs the athletes who play for their country out of their own...

Ten episodes in, we stopped to look back. This one's a highlight reel: producer Jaeden steps out from behind the scenes to co-host for the first time, and he and Simon walk back through the first ten episodes of the Accessible Future Podcast to pull the lessons that stuck. What stood out most was how much the ideas rhyme. These guests never met and never compared notes, and they kept arriving...

What does it take to make the arts open to d/Deaf and disabled people? Jenel Shaw, executive director of Arts AccessAbility Network Manitoba (AANM), joins Simon to explain how her organization is doing it — starting with an accessibility audit that the disability community designed itself. Jenel walks through why AANM skipped the usual panel of doctors, therapists, and architects and asked disable...

Julie “Jules” Emeid has a diploma, an honours degree, and a master's in progress, and she still gets read as a twenty-year-old who "doesn't know anything" the moment she walks into an interview. On this episode, she breaks down what ableism at work actually looks like: the hiring bias that sits in the gap between a strong résumé and the room, the assumptions people make about dis...

What if the biggest barrier to healthcare isn't the clinic, but getting there? For more than two decades, Paul Siller has run the Rocky View Regional Handibus Society, a rural charity that gets people to the appointments, groceries, and everyday places they can't reach on their own. In this episode of the Accessible Future Podcast, Paul and host Simon Jones reframe what accessible transpor...

Kelly Thibodeau builds her work around one idea: accessibility is personal. The founder of Squarely Accessible joins Simon to talk about what inclusive design actually means online, and why so much of it comes down to a single choice, including people on purpose, or excluding them by accident. Kelly shares the story of watching her mom's world shrink as technology moved on without her, the bus...

Julie “Jules” Emeid has a diploma, an honours degree, and a master's in progress, and she still gets read as a twenty-year-old who "doesn't know anything" the moment she walks into an interview. On this episode, she breaks down what ableism at work actually looks like: the hiring bias that sits in the gap between a strong résumé and the room, the assumptions people make about dis...

Chrissy Sadowski spent years caring for her mother, who has MS, without anyone calling it caregiving. She was a teenager seeking help who was told no. She was a young adult who grew up in a house full of unknowns and ambulance visits and learned to move on. It wasn't until she was 38 years old, sitting in a room with the Young Caregivers Association, that it clicked. She had been a young careg...

Beth Deer is a reporter and podcast host for AMI, Canada's accessible media broadcaster, and shares life as a blind person with her followers under @the_blind_girlie. She was born with optic nerve hypoplasia and lost the functional vision she grew up with at 13 following a surgery that went wrong. In this episode: her Zootopia theory of what an accessible world actually looks like, the differe...

Most conversations about accessibility focus on ramps, apps, and adaptive features. Luke Mellor thinks there’s a missing link. If transit itself doesn't show up when you need it, or doesn't go where you need to go, none of the rest of it matters. Luke works at Pantonium, a Canadian company that builds on-demand transit software rooted in the paratransit space. In this episode, he breaks do...

Jubilee Dueck-Thiessen is the Executive Director of the Manitoba Down Syndrome Society. She started with MDSS as a student, spent years at L'Arche Winnipeg leading community programs and a major accessibility-focused art exhibit, and has now returned to MDSS to lead the organization. In this episode, she makes a case for seeing disability not through a medical lens, asking what's wrong and...

In todays episode of Accessible Future, host Simon Jones sits down with three members of L'Arche Winnipeg, Grace, Mira, and Jordan, to talk about what barrier free living actually looks like when it goes beyond ramps and wheelchair access. L'Arche is built on the idea that people with and without intellectual disabilities can live together, share a home, and grow from one another. Not as a...

What does a wheelchair fencer, criminal defence lawyer, datascientist, and accessibility auditor have in common? They're all Peter Tonge, and he's here to challenge how organizations think about disability inclusion.   In this episode, host Simon Jones sits down with Peter Tongeof Peter Tonge Consulting to explore what accessibility really means beyond the building code. Peter has been a w...

1.3 billion people are excluded by a world that isn’t designed for them. Dismantling the barriers 1 in 6 people face is no easy task - but it starts with education. In this trailer, host Simon Jones introduces a brand-new journey into the world of accessibility. By day, Simon works at MoveMobility, building wheelchair-accessible vehicles in Canada. Through his work, he has realized that while phys...